Peapack-Gladstone’s slow-motion dispute — played out over five years — reveals the worst of our NIMBY culture.

Jameir Warren Treadwell, a resident at the Matheny School, turns and smiles at his teacher during a morning class. Robert Sciarrino/The Star-Ledger

Do you feel sorry for folks who buy a home by the highway, then demand pricey sound walls because the traffic’s too loud? Or the family who moves out to the country, then complains about the surrounding farms because they don’t like the way they smell?

No pity here. Those are the choices you make when you buy into a neighborhood.

Matheny is an angelic facility that cares for children with some of the rarest disabilities known. It sits on 82 acres at the dead end of Highland Avenue, where it first opened more than 60 years ago — long before the McMansions and their owners moved in.

Five years ago, Matheny asked permission to expand — adding new classrooms, hospital rooms and beds for its long-term residents, a therapy pool, and parking for new staff it planned to hire. Each would contribute to Matheny’s core mission of helping fragile, disabled kids.

The mansion-dwellers, however, had heard enough. They banded together for a relentless attack.

First, they somehow convinced the local Land Use Board that Matheny didn’t meet the municipality’s zoning definition for its property written decades ago — “a residential healthcare facility in conjunction with a school,” even though that’s precisely what Matheny is — because of technicalities. The neighbors won, which meant Matheny needed a variance to expand.

For that battle, the neighbors turned to Jersey’s go-to bogeyman: traffic. They claimed employees and visitors endangered kids on their country lane. Matheny offered signs, sidewalks and speed bumps. They’d rent off-site parking and shuttle workers back and forth. Neighbors rejected them all. The school lost again, then sued. Ultimately, it lost in court this month, too.

This slow-motion dispute — played out over five years — reveals the worst of NIMBY culture. That a handful of busybodies pushed their “Not in My Back Yard” choke hold years into the past, and won, is a miscarriage of reason and mercy.

That’s not to suggest Matheny’s loss wasn’t legal and by the book. On the contrary: The process was so rigorously litigated that, by the end, it was drained of any humanity.

The borough’s refusal of Matheny’s expansion plan leaves its future in Peapack-Gladstone an open question. During the fight, some critics suggested Matheny move out — an opinion that isn’t shared by most of the town, or even most of Highland Avenue.

Remember: Matheny’s 101 residents live in Peapack-Gladstone, too, and their home was there before the McMansion owners. Let’s hope that one neighborhood’s foolish fight, and the town’s soulless agreement, doesn’t scare away the best the borough has to offer.